Prosodic planning: Local and distant effects of phrase length on pause duration.

Abstract

Prosodic boundaries, as manifested in pause duration, are known to be influenced by structural properties of the phrases immediately preceding and following the boundary, such as their syntactic structure, prosodic structure, and phonological length. Little is known, however, about how phrases at a distance from a boundary, i.e., not immediately preceding or following it, may affect the durational characteristics of pausing at that boundary. An experiment is presented that investigates the effects on pause duration of prosodic phrases of different length, both immediately at the boundary and farther away from it. The goal is to (a) examine local and distant effects of prosodic phrase length on pause duration and (b) to examine incrementality in production of prosodic structure, i.e., to examine how far ahead speakers plan an utterance, and how prosodic structure affects the planning process. Subjects read 24 English sentences varying along the following parameters: (a) length in syllables (two or four syllables) of the intonational phrase immediately following a target pause and (b) length in syllables of the second, distant, intonational phrase following the pause (10 or 16 syllables long). The synchronous speech paradigm [F. Cummins (2002); E. Zvonik, F. Cummins (2002)] was used to minimize variability in production.